Mental resiliency is like a mental muscle that helps people bounce back from life stressors. Similar to other muscles, it needs to be kept fit and healthy. Muscles function at their peak when they have been trained to have strength, endurance and flexibility. Mental muscle needs the same.
- Strength is equal to courage;
- Endurance is equal to persistence; and
- Flexibility is equal to the ability to adapt.
People need all three of these attributes. Companies that model resiliency in their leadership are more likely to cultivate a resilient workforce.
People who are mentally resilient can see past adversity and maintain high levels of functioning despite chaos and disruption. In contrast, less hardy individuals often succumb to feelings of victimization and resort to maladaptive coping. When faced with overwhelming life situations, many non-resilient individuals engage in behaviors that help boost feelings of well-being or escape in the short run but cause bigger problems in the long run. These behaviors include self-medicating through alcohol, drugs, mindless video game playing or television watching, unhealthy sexual activity or pornography, out-of-control spending and over-eating, to name a few.
Being resilient doesn’t mean stoically powering through impossible expectations or suppressing feelings of anger or sadness. It means having the ability to acknowledge and adapt to stress and ultimately to grow from it.
Building Resilience is a Health and Safety Priority
When executives and their employees have not built their mental muscles of resilience, they can find themselves overwhelmed. When they experience intense life crises such as divorce, challenges in caregiving or parenting, or acute illness or injury—or when they experience emotional stressors like failure, embarrassment or rejection—recovery time may be prolonged when resilience isn’t present. Problem-solving and decisiveness are often compromised when people are highly distressed and feel as though they are walking up on a high wire without a safety net.
When it comes to mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress, depression, addiction and the response to difficult life transitions, people are buffered by the strength of their resilience. When the tools of resilience are not in place, these mental health conditions and other significant stressors can result in distraction, impaired perception and judgment, and fatigue that can cause safety risks for employers.
Building resilience is a very proactive way to prevent suicide. These mental and social reservoirs get built up over time, in the same way daily workouts in the gym build up cardiovascular fortitude.
Mental Muscle Workouts
Similar to using fitness trainers to improve physical health, there are workouts to improve mental health.
1. Be Bold
Fear is essential for survival and evolution. In the days when humans were being chased by saber-tooth tigers, fear was the response that dumped chemicals in the body to prepare for fight or flight.
Today, fear is more likely to be psychological than physical—fears of failure, rejection and humiliation—but our brains don’t know the difference. Our brains tell us our boss is like a “saber-tooth tiger” when he tells us we are failing. Even when we anticipate this news, our nervous system kicks into high gear, which results in experiences such as insomnia and panic attacks. Many people feel nauseous thinking about giving a major public speech because they fear humiliation and the judgment of what we perceive of the “saber-tooth tigers” in the audience.
Being bold is the heavy lifting part of the workout strategy for building the mental muscle. Every time humans face this fear, their mental muscle gets stronger. If they are not in actual physical danger, only psychological fear, they can learn to practice being bold by feeling the fear and stepping into it regardless.
2. Belong
Social isolation is a public health crisis, according to former Surgeon General Murthy. Lonely people are much more likely to die of heart disease or stroke or experience Alzheimer’s disease than people with well-connected friendship networks, even after researchers corrected for age, gender and lifestyle choices such as working out and good nutrition. Isolation may even be as much of a long-term risk factor for mortality as smoking.
Miller McPherson, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and research professor of sociology at Duke University, published a very compelling study with his colleagues that gave strong evidence that our true social networks are shrinking. They wanted to know how many confidants people had, defining confidants as people which whom they could share anything. Then they compared the number confidants from 1985 to 2004. He found that in 1985, the modal respondent had at least three confidants; by 2004, that number had shrunk to only one. When humans only have one person with whom to share the inner most thoughts, they are highly vulnerable if anything happens to that relationship.
To determine who many confidants you have, consider the following questions.
- Who can you count on to listen to you when you really need to talk?
- Who would console you when you are very upset?
- Who can you count on in a crisis even though they would have to go out of their way to help you?
When people don’t have at least three (and they should have closer to 10 to have a strong sense of social support), it’s time to work on building authentic social connections.
3. Be Well
Most people are familiar with the idea of wellness—everyday active practices of self-care that lead to a healthy, fully engaged life. However, most equate this idea of wellness to just one aspect of wellness: physical wellness, focused mainly on fitness and nutrition.
But there are other aspects of wellness we need in our mental fitness regimen.
- Cognitive wellness includes sharpening skills and committing to lifelong learning. We become cognitively stronger when traveling to new places, learning new languages or instruments, or developing new skills.
- Social and emotional wellness includes keeping relationships intact. When this form of wellness is practiced, people improve emotional regulation skills such as anger management and distress tolerance as well as interpersonal skills such as conflict resolution and empathy.
- Spiritual wellness includes committing to something larger than ourselves, including in the faith community, volunteering to serve the common good, standing up for injustice or appreciating nature.
4. Believe
Resilient people often get through hard times because they believe that there is something on the other side of their distress. These practices are sometimes connected to their faith or spirituality and sometimes to their ability to make meaning from and even be transformed by their darkest days. Some of these practices include the following.
- Discernment. Sitting silently with big questions and listening to the quiet, still voice within. This practice is especially important with questions of right and wrong and truth.
- Gratitude. Gratitude is the experience of appreciating a gift that has been received. It can come in many forms and be evoked by different practices. As a “making meaning” practice, gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness that we can bring forward by contemplating what is valuable. Even in the midst of hardship, it’s almost always possible to find something to be grateful for that puts pain into perspective or helps learn lessons from the experience.
- Hope. Hope is an optimistic expectation for the future. It opens us up to create new possibilities. Hope can be a shield against despair and similar to gratitude, it can be practiced with prudence. Neuroscience shows innate bias toward optimism is good for us. According to cognitive neuroscientist and author of “The Science of Optimism,” by Tali Sharot, 80 percent of people have a bias to overestimate the likelihood that good things will happen to us. This bias leads to success in athletics, business, politics and health.
Each of these components needs care over the long term to sustain high performance and bounce back when life derails us.
